Re-Imagining the Role of the Art Center (EP.53)
Recorded
April 27, 2021
Last Updated
January 13, 2021
This conversation was recorded as part of Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit that took place on April 27, 2021.
What does it look like to co-create a future where everyone thrives? We explore re-imagining the role of the art center as a canvas and place to play and explore, and how to transform society by transforming organizations and the systems and structures that built and sustain them.
Guest: Deborah Cullinan
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guest
DEBORAH CULLINAN Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) CEO Deborah Cullinan is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the pivotal role artists and arts organizations can play in shaping our social and political landscape, and has spent years mobilizing communities through arts and culture. Deborah is committed to revolutionizing the role art centers play in public life and during her tenure at YBCA, she has launched several bold new programs, engagement strategies, and civic coalitions. Prior to joining YBCA in 2013, she was the Executive Director of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. She is a co-founder of CultureBank, co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance, Vice Chair of the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, and on the boards of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust and HumanMade. She is a Field Leader in Residence at Arizona State University’s National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation and a former Innovator in Residence at the Kauffman Foundation. She currently serves on Governor Gavin Newsom’s Jobs and Business Recovery Task Force.
Co-Hosts
LAUREN RUFFIN (she/her) is a thinker, designer, & leader interested in building strong, sustainable, anti-racist systems & organizations. She's into exploring how we can leverage new technologies to combat racial and economic injustice. As part of this work, she frequently participates in conversations on circular economies, social impact financing, solidarity movements, and innovative, non-extractive financing mechanisms. Lauren is a co-founder of CRUX, an immersive storytelling cooperative that collaborates with Black artists as they create content in virtual reality and augmented reality (XR). Lauren is currently the interim Chief Marketing Officer of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she focuses on amplifying the stories and activism of the YBCA community. Prior to joining YBCA, Lauren was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, the largest association of independent artists in the United States. In 2017, she started Artist Campaign School, a new educational program that has trained 74 artists to run for political office to date. She has served on the governing board of Black Girls Code and Main Street Phoenix Cooperative, and on the advisory boards of ArtUp and Black Girl Ventures. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with a degree in Political Science and obtained a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law.
TIM CYNOVA (he/him) is Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., a management consulting firm specializing in HR and human-centered organizational design. Whether it's through shared leadership explorations or alternative workplace arrangements, re-imagining recruitment and hiring processes to center equity and inclusion or decolonizing workplaces policies, practices, and programs, WSS is focused on helping companies co-create places where everyone can thrive. Tim is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator. He serves on the faculty of Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design and Strategic HR. In August 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the COO and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made this commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Also, during a particularly slow summer, he bicycled 3,902 miles across the United States.
Transcript
Deborah Cullinan:
Transforming society, you can't do it if you haven't transformed the institutions and structures that built it the way it is. And you also can't do it if you aren't willing to change yourself and to give up, right? And so I feel like there's a lot of that over the course of the year of what it means to give up, to let go to, step aside, to move out of the way, has been really powerful. But again, we're not nowhere near all the way there yet, it's really the work ahead.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I’m Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that.
Earlier this year, podcasting's favorite co-host Lauren Ruffin and I produced Work Shouldn't Suck's Ethical Re-Opening Summit. The event took place online on Tuesday, April 27, and featured eight sessions, 25 amazing speakers, and covered a whole host of topics related to the ethical re-opening of workplaces amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
We raced to produce the Summit from start to finish in just three weeks as we felt the urgency and stress mounting as workplaces were in the midst of re-opening decisions. Several months on, we still feel the content is as necessary as ever, so we decided to release each of the sessions in podcast form.
In each of the eight sessions, you'll hear the conversations just as the Summit attendees did. As a reminder, in late April 2021, COVID vaccine distribution was just gaining speed and we had yet to begin hearing about the Delta variant. From that vantage point in time, it very much looked like by Fall 2021 things might be settling back into somewhat of a quote unquote normal routine. As I record this preamble in Fall 2021, that's not the case. We're now talking about break-through infections, booster shots, schools opening and closing again, hospital ICUs are packed in states across the U.S., and still how to safety gathering in indoors as the temperature again begins to drop with the change in seasons.
In the Ethical Re-Opening Summit's closing plenary -- Into the Future! -- Lauren Ruffin and I are joined by the amazing Deborah Cullinan. We discuss a whole host of things including, what does it look like to co-create a future where everyone thrives. So, let's jump over to the conversation…
Tim Cynova:
Hey everyone, I am Tim Cynova and welcome to our closing main stage. It's like we just started this summit and now we're at the closing main stage.
Lauren Ruffin:
It's wild.
Tim Cynova:
It is wild.
Lauren Ruffin:
What a day.
Tim Cynova:
What a day indeed. Well, in starting this session I'm Tim Cynova, I'm a White man with medium to short brown, messy hair. I have blue rectangular glasses and salt and pepper unshaven look. I'm wearing a black sweater that zips up with a blue dress shirt, blue tie, and I'm sitting in front of wood paneling. Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And hey I'm Lauren, I'm still an openly Black person with brown skin, wearing a black sweatshirt, wearing a green hat. I'm in a room with a white door and a white dresser behind me and a quickly growing pandemic Lego village on top of the dresser.
Tim Cynova:
Nice. Well, and speaking about the pandemic, last year when the pandemic arrived and things began to shut down, you and I decided we should host a daily live stream show and just invite all of our friends to come onto the daily live stream, who happen to be fascinating and amazing people. And for five weeks, every day, we hosted that live stream and connected with many of you who are here, and many of the guests that are on this. And this sort of led to this summit. Lauren and I were talking about what we should do this year. We said, "You know what we did last year over five weeks, let's just do it all in one day." And we felt the world was beginning to open up quicker and quicker, we were like, "And we should do it really soon." And so that's why the summit came together with just over three weeks notice. So again, a huge thanks to all of you for being with us, a huge thanks to all our speakers and panelists from those 33 amazing guests last year on our morning show, we were pleased to spend time with Deborah Cullinan who has agreed to come back on and talk with us again-
Lauren Ruffin:
Brave soul.
Tim Cynova:
Brave soul to be back. Deborah is currently the CEO of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is one of the nation's leading thinkers on the pivotal role of arts organizations can play in shaping our social and political landscape and has spent years mobilizing communities through arts and cultures. Prior to joining YBCA almost 10 years ago, she was the executive director of San Francisco's Intersection for the Arts. She's a co-founder of CultureBank, co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance, vice chair of the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, on the boards of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust and HumanMade. I should have just posted this in the chat because it's an awesome long bio. I will post this in the chat. She's a field leader in residence at Arizona State University's National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation, a former innovator in residence at the Coffin Foundation. She currently serves on the governor's jobs and business recovery task force, and her passion for using art and creativity to shift culture has made her a sought after speaker at events and conferences around the world. And one of the reasons we are so excited that she is here today joining us. Deborah, welcome to the summit
Deborah Cullinan:
Thanks for having me and for reading that long bio.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Tim I didn't know we were going to be that formal. It's always weird to realize your friends are kind of big shots.
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah. I'm glad to be here.
Lauren Ruffin:
Cool. And how are you doing today?
Deborah Cullinan:
I'm doing pretty well. So I'm in San Francisco. The sky is blue. This is the land of the Ohlone Ramaytush people, and I am a white woman. My hair is brownish red, my eyes are blue. I've got some red lipstick on and I'm in a bluish-gray room with a painting behind me and a plant trying to get in as well. And the blue sky is what's making me feel good today.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, that's good. I was talking with someone yesterday who left the Bay Area for Atlanta, who reminded me of the orange skies that you all had out there, which to me was this... When I think of the pandemic there are a couple of moments, one of them is obviously the live stream as a bookend on one side. And then for me, the orange sky, because I was talking about coming to the Bay Area. It was like a middle point and now I feel like perhaps this is another transitional point, even though we're not at the end of the pandemic, but everything that happened to Bay Area over the last year has been pretty pivotal, I think, and transformative. How are you reflecting on that and holding all that right now?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah, I mean, your mentioning of the sky and my mentioning of the sky, it's complicated to have joy when the sky is blue for days on end, because what we really need is rain. And we know some of the cities in the Bay Area region are already putting folks on lower water use. We don't anticipate a good year ahead in terms of water, weather fires, drought and there's just something about living in that constancy that I think helps us to stay somewhere at the edge, just kind of constantly asking, why were we doing it that way and what is the tomorrow going to be? I remember a few years ago in the fire season when everything shut down and I just started to think about, this is the role of an art center now, to be a place with circulated air that can be safe for people. And so how do all of these conditions and things around us really affect the way we think about our institutions as responders and as resources?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And so this thing is named the Ethical Re-opening Summit. And we were in the green room talking about how grateful Tim and I are as co-CEOs of Fractured Atlas to not have to think a lot about reopening because we made the choice before the pandemic to go 100% remote. You did a weird thing, which was you declared YBCA open months ago. Can you talk a bit about that and what that means?
Deborah Cullinan:
For us, and it kind of picks up on the conversation that the three of us had at the beginning of the pandemic, it's really about not reopening, but re-imagining, and not returning, but regenerating. And so, as we, as an organization started to really think about what the future holds and what our dream state is, who do we really want to be when we get to the other side? It was not to return. And so our declaration was, we are open and we're doing open differently. So the idea was to manifest what it can feel like to turn a building inside out to serve a community that can't come inside, to work with artists to really capture this moment, all of it. The pain, the trauma, the injustice, and also the hope. And so it was very much about really putting a stake in the ground around the idea that we have to turn our spaces outwards. We have to think differently about what we're calling upon people to do when they engage with our organization. So it was the beginning of a journey and it's all one great big experiment. We're not actually urgent as I say, to reopen, we're much more urgent about what we can be and how we might be able to imagine and realize that not by taking the lead, but by following artists and community members who are really the best designers of our systems and structures anyway.
Tim Cynova:
From a practical process standpoint, what did that look like? How did you do that?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of different things. Part of it is just in re-imagining the structure of YBCA so that we moved very far away from top-down curatorial silos to one big program and engage teams. We tried to think about all of the artists that we were working with and artists that we were working with before the pandemic and before shelter in place. And to ask them, what do you want to do? What are the stories you want to tell? What are the messages that you want to be able to provide to the public? And so taking a team that was very used to making exhibitions, producing performances and turning that team to the idea that the building, the facade, the campus around us is essentially a canvas, a place to play and also to emphasize not so much the product, but rather the process of art making.
And so you see like Caleb Duarte's piece, The Monument as Living Memory is a really good example of this because it had been dynamically evolving over the course of many, many months in deep collaboration with artists and creative collectives in the Bay Area, in order to not only interrogate what monuments mean to us, think about the role of street art, really engage a dialogue around that, but also to just be really responsive. To be able to not think so up-down, something goes up, it's static, it comes down, we go back to the same, but rather more like layers. When an artist comes and works with us and we put something on the wall, or on the building, or on the sidewalk, what is it like to not just go neutral? Put it up, take it down, go neutral.
What is that? And how do you actually instead make layers and create an environment where the process is what you're experiencing and where the inquiry is what people get to experience? So that's how it has evolved. I think as we move forward the environment that we hope to create and co-create, and work with our community to do is really a public square. A dynamic, ongoing, interactive kind of environment. So again, not so much about up-down exhibitions or a season of performances, but a dynamic environment that can be of service to the community.
Lauren Ruffin:
What's been the hardest about that re-imagining process? Is it the internal change of various staff members or your colleagues' risk tolerance? Is it just not being able to sort of see what's coming ahead because it hasn't been built yet and it doesn't exist anywhere, or is it something else that's sort of... What's been hardest?
Deborah Cullinan:
I mean, I think you're kind of getting to what I would say is hardest. I think that change is hard because of the uncertainty it provides. And so for me, I think if you don't know where you're going, it's really hard to trust the path. And if you came onto that path with a certain definition of the expertise and skills and values that you can bring to the table and you can't see how those things that you bring fit in and will help guide us there, it's really challenging. And so a big shout out to the YBCA team as you know, there've just been all kinds of just so much uncertainty, where are we going? And so really trying to create an environment where it's okay to try something, fail, iterate, correct, decide it was a terrible idea. But at the end of the day, we have to try. And so I think the hardest thing is to create conditions that make people feel valued and clear and safe in pursuit of something that is not yet known.
Tim Cynova:
What's one thing that you've tried over the past year where you were like, "Yeah, that was cool. I'm really glad that worked out." And what's one thing that did not go as planned? "Had we known that was going to end that way, we should have not done that."
Deborah Cullinan:
Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, because it's so fresh in my mind, I will say that the YBCA 100 Summit was just an incredibly grounding and inspiring experience for me to see the way that we could work with Crocs in particular to really test and play with environments and experience in the virtual space was really powerful. But maybe more for me, it was the feeling of together and of community that began to brew among the artists. This feeling that you say all these things. We want to be a place that shifts resource and power to artists. We want to put artists and community members in the lead. We believe that artists and community members are the best designers of their own future, but can we really do it? Are we really going to do it?
And to me just hearing and feeling the energy, I'm not saying we're there by any means, but I'm saying it's possible. And to know it's possible, it's so gratifying to me. So that's one side of it, right? But the other side of it is to say those things and strive to do those things means that you really are in it and you have to be willing to change, right? Transforming society, you can't do it if you haven't transformed the institutions and structures that built it the way it is. And you also can't do it if you aren't willing to change yourself and to give up, right? And so I feel like there's a lot of that over the course of the year of what it means to give up, to let go to, step aside, to move out of the way, has been really powerful.
But again, we're not nowhere near all the way there yet, it's really the work ahead. As far as things that maybe haven't gone well, what came to mind when you were asking the question is more about the role that YBCA has played specifically in San Francisco during the pandemic, as the co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance. And just being in this community for such a long time, The instinct is to be of service, to really help, to raise our hands all the time. Like, "what can we do? What can we do?" And I think that maybe what we didn't understand is that sometimes even raising the hand isn't necessarily the right thing to do as a White led organization, as an organization that is relatively big and depending on how you look at it. And so for me, it's much more about how do we constantly interrogate and understand our right place in the world?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And I am really curious about that piece because you all have stepped into some stuff that's not purely creative. I mean, you're getting into basic income and really so first responder type things and almost quasi government type things. How are you holding that? When you're raising your hand for that sort of thing, how does that feel stepping into those spaces that are relatively new for the infrastructure that's been built with YBCA?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot in that question, right? There's just, how do you build capacity for new lines of business and new pathways for an organization that operated in a certain way? But for us as you know, the transformation has been pretty thorough and there are three focus areas for YBCA. One is YBCA create, one is YBCA champion, one is YBCA invest. And we look at all three of these things as essential together. You can't do one, you've got to do all three because they're really for us a sort of ecosystem development set. It's about building an ecosystem of artists who are working to advance health and wellbeing in their communities, artists who are committed to cultural equity and racial justice. And how do we build the capacity?
How do we change the policy? How do we create new kinds of curatorial and program structures that are much more inclusive that are driven by artists that are not top-down? And then how do we invest differently? How do we think about economic security in our sector? How do we address just what is wrong with it? So that collection of things makes all of this makes sense. We have to do all three of these things. In terms of the guaranteed income program and some of the programs that we've been doing in collaboration with city government, it's just tough. When you use public dollars, there are all kinds of things that you have to consider that you wouldn't have to consider if you're operating with private money. And I also think that it reveals large amounts of public dollars going to YBCA, even if all of those dollars are going to go back out into the community, it's still wrong, right?
That the money goes to this one organization. And part of the reason why we're driven to do it is to test and understand better ways of approaching it. To build knowledge so that we can shift policy around how we fund artists and community-based arts organizations like those that have been doing the work for decades, and haven't been funded. So it's putting yourself out there, right? But it's also a commitment to trying to understand and interrogate and even prove that some things are actually not a good idea. And so even with the guaranteed income, I think there's just a ton to learn there about what is good about that and what is not good about that, and what can we learn as a field about the right way to think about providing a floor for artists and creative workers.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And is a program like that a springboard that ultimately helps... Are there particular points in a creative person's life where you can inject that sort of capital into that, that becomes a springboard to middle-class 10 or 15 years later? I mean, that's the durational sort of data that I'm really interested in with that program.
Deborah Cullinan:
Right. And you're sort of revealing one of the challenges with it, which is it's pilot, it's a limited amount of dollars. We would have preferred to provide this guaranteed income for fewer artists for a longer period of time not because we wanted only to support fewer artists obviously, but more because we wanted to gather as much information as we could. And so that kind of durational, we need to be able to understand things and we need the time to understand things. Otherwise, we keep kind of creating reactive policy that has such detrimental effect for so long, way longer than that 15 years that you're talking about, we're talking about hundreds of years, right? And so to me, it feels like we just underestimate how important it is to learn.
Tim Cynova:
There's a question here that feels related to what we've been talking about. In terms of new models and the changes you've made this year due to the pandemic, what specific changes have you made you wish to keep and what old models are you happy to get rid of?
Lauren Ruffin:
That's dangerously close to the suitcase question.
Deborah Cullinan:
Well, it's a simple question.
Tim Cynova:
I know. You need to parse it. You need to hold the things that you're going to say for the suitcase question until later.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'll go big on the suitcase question.
Deborah Cullinan:
Yeah, we could spend all the time on that. Coming into the pandemic, we had already been undertaking a real transformational effort at YBCA and all I can say about it for us, and this is for our organization, all I can say about it is it wasn't bold enough. And it wasn't fast enough. It wasn't bold enough. For us, the right thing is as much change as possible, right? And so I know that's not a really specific answer to the question, but we are just well situated just because we have a really amazing board that's open to this kind of inquiry, because the team is so dynamic and powerful that we have the opportunity to explore the very edges, to toss as much of it out as possible. And again, back to the piece about learning, so we can learn. But I'm not saying that everyone should throw the baby out with the bath water. I'm just saying for us, it feels right to try to do as much of that as we can.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. And you've got a pretty high risk tolerance as a leader.
Deborah Cullinan:
You think?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, for sure.
Deborah Cullinan:
I don't know. I mean, it's just like when you go... We all have been through so much and I just don't know what else we're supposed to do, but try. And the worst that can happen is that we fail, to me what would be much worse is not trying.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. No, I'm with you on that and I think there's a particular sense of urgency over the last year that is important to acknowledge that we really have to be bold and go big to not go back to where it was, but it really wasn't working for most people. And the data bears that out. I think our emotions and our feelings and our grief bears that out, but yeah, I really appreciate that.
Tim Cynova:
We should say for the people who have heard the suitcase question, and we just thought it as a cliffhanger, we're going to close our interview, which I guess is another cliffhanger. But the question that Deborah asked us during our live stream last year and we thought, "Well, if she's back on the show, she's back at the summit, so let's ask her it." And so when we get to that, you'll understand what the question is and why we are sort of, I guess, threading the needle not to answer the question before we ask the question.
Lauren Ruffin:
Tim, did you have a question? I can talk to Deborah all day, but I want to make sure-
Tim Cynova:
It sounded like I had a question the way I ended that sentence, but no, I was going to you to bounce back in.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I want to dig into some of the artists who've inspired you over the last year. I was part of the 100, that was so hopeful and so amazing. But what else are you seeing that you think points the way to a better future?
Deborah Cullinan:
I think about artists that we've been working with in West Oakland and in our Artist-Led Giving Circle, Hassan Rashid, Fay Darmawi, these are people who fundamentally understand shared future and interdependence. And it bears out in the work, in Hussein's photography, and it bears out. And so for me, it's been this kind of collective inspiration, the story of the Artist-Led Giving Circle is a powerful one, right? Because we were working with a group of artists from different parts of the country, including the Bay Area. And we were talking about investment and preparing for the SOCAP, the Social Capital Markets conference and thinking about how these artists would pitch their work in the context of a social impact investment conversation. And the question arose around well, what would happen if one of us was funded, if one of us got investment?
And the immediate answer was, "Oh, well, we'd all be funded." And that applies not only to the way the artists that we're working with might be thinking about financial resource, but also about resource in general and just how we work together and how we can together, better steward the assets that we have. I mentioned Cece Carpio whose work is on the window of YBCA on Mission Street. People like Cece and others who really are thinking about how to Chronicle the time, which is so important, but also unearth the history. And to my mind, that's where we need to be going, is we have to see where we've been and what we've done in order to stand in a present moment with the ability to imagine a better future. And these artists are really willing to do that work.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I'm really curious about how we're making sense of this period of time in real time and how we're centering creators of color. And we know that in the Bay Area Latinx communities have been hit the hardest around the country, Black communities have been hit really hard by the virus and having a platform for artists of color to be able to tell their stories contemporaneously, this feels like it's so important. And it's the only way to me that we're going to come out of this with any sort of headiness about how it happened, so that we don't get back to the thing that caused it. And I do think that a number of the artists you're working with are doing a really good job with that documentation, which to me is critical. And it gets lost in times when everything's happening so fast. And there's not really a question there, but it's more of a wondering, how are we holding all these things at the same time?
Deborah Cullinan:
Well, and it just makes me think of the YBCA 10, the group of 10 artists who are working with us over the next year, at least. For me, what I come to is, what does it mean that our structures and systems have actually done the opposite of creating the conditions for really unleashing creativity, for really making it possible for artists and creative people of all kinds to do the work? It's such a trip when you really think about that. That we've actually created structures that stifle that either from an economic security perspective or from the way we approach and transact with artists rather than build deep relationships with them. So again, not a question either, but just what was coming to mind when you were talking and I just feel hopeful that we better understand now how important creativity at its maximum is to us as a society, and that we can just hold on to that. Don't forget that.
Tim Cynova:
I will follow up your two profound statements that weren't questions with a question. So Deborah, unless I pulled an outdated bio, is it you're on the governor's jobs and business recovery task force? That's currently one of the things you're doing?
Deborah Cullinan:
I was indeed on his jobs and business recovery task force but the whole thing came to an end. So I need to update my bio, but I did serve on that along with Mayor Breed's economic recovery task force here in San Francisco. And I'll tell you that was a trip with Governor Newsom's task force, because I was the only arts person of, I don't know exactly what the total amount of people was, but somewhere between 100 and 150 people. And it was still a lot of focus on the superstars in the State of California, a lot of folks in the tech sector and people leading really large organizations. And so it was a really kind of fun anomalous place to be. And to the stuff that we've been talking about here, it was not difficult to capture our governor's attention around the incredibly essential role that artists and arts organizations and creative workers in California play. And the reason it was not difficult is because we all had hit a wall. It was a terrible spot, racial injustice, systemic violence, wildfires. We can't get people to wear their masks. People won't trust to take the vaccine. Hitting a wall somehow opened hearts and minds to what's possible.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. I want to take a hard left turn because I'm thinking a lot about the advocacy work that you all have been doing or you have done historically.
California's passed some really interesting laws in the last year that have impacted the gig workers who we know are disproportionately artists and people of color. What's happening there now? Because there was a lot of nervousness around some of these laws of how it was going to impact the nonprofit sector, how it was going to impact 1099 folks who... What's happening there and where does YBCA see its role in plugging into these policy and advocacy conversations? Has it changed since the pandemic or does it remains the same?
Deborah Cullinan:
I think we've always played a really active role of thinking, not only about legislation and public policy advocacy, but also just championing the role, the arts play in other sectors. And so I think it's very deeply rooted and very important to what we do because we're trying to raise awareness and build, grow the demand for artists and arts organizations. I think that in particular, AB-5 and legislation that has been quite controversial as it relates to contract workers and other gig related workers. This kind of goes to this whole thing of we get really reactive and we develop and pass legislation that is not entirely thoughtful. And again, it's top-down instead of bottom-up. Wouldn't it make sense to maybe communicate with the people that are going to be affected most, which would be the workers themselves? But the good news on that is that there's been a lot of advocacy and that has resulted in edits to the legislation. So it's moving in the right direction. And the other piece that's good about it is it did raise awareness in general about the state of those workers who are contracting gigging 1099-ing. And how many of them there are in addition to the fact that you could argue that artists were the first gig workers.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, yeah. That's where it comes from, right?
Deborah Cullinan:
Yep. Yeah, and I think there's just a lot of opportunity right now to think not only about like art related policy, but how art and artists are integrated into policy. And I think there's some really exciting opportunities there as well. Not only at the state level, but federal.
Tim Cynova:
Well speaking about innovating, what does an innovator in residence at the Kauffmann Foundation do? What did that experience look like?
Deborah Cullinan:
That was awesome. There were seven of us and we were inside of the entrepreneurship program and our job was to think up and dream up and test out big, hairy ideas and also be a bit disruptive inside of the foundation. And I was the arts person. I really like it when it's not just all of us arts people, but I was working with folks who were on some other level when it comes to social finance, really thinking differently about law, running a whole new way of training young people towards work in the tech sector. So as usual, it was about really helping everyone think about how you integrate the arts into what we all do. And I got to spend a lot of time in Kansas City, which I came to love, and I got to know the arts ecosystem there, which was really inspiring.
Lauren Ruffin:
And lots of good barbecue.
Deborah Cullinan:
That is right. Lots of good barbecue. And I tried to find barbecue that was named after a woman, but I have yet. So if anyone... Tom's barbecue, Bob's barbecue. I'm not coming up with any of the actual real names right now, but yeah, it became of interest to me to see if there was any barbecue in Kansas City or restaurant that was named after a woman. And I don't know. So if anyone knows, tell me.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, interesting. I'm going to do some research on that. But you brought up capital and I think one of the... I spent some time thinking about how money moves into and out of various ecosystems. I don't want to talk about an NFTs or blockchain or Bitcoin, but I feel like what want to say is over the last couple of months, and San Francisco feels like it's sort of ground zero for this conversation about revenue generation and how we can maybe modernize how capital flows, because it really hasn't changed much in 400 years. It's the same basic sort of method of transfer. I'm going to have to talk about NFTs.
Deborah Cullinan:
Oh, no, I knew this was coming.
Lauren Ruffin:
Well, I think the bigger thing is when we're talking about these new technologies and new ways of transferring wealth, there becomes an opportunity to fundamentally reshift workers' relationship to their labor and how we see them, or don't see them as commodities in the marketplace. And I know that you all are right there thinking through all this stuff and are talking to companies who are thinking through this stuff like, what should we be paying attention to over the next couple months? Because cryptocurrency is not mature, blockchain is not mature yet, but what should we be looking at as leaders as workers, and as-
Deborah Cullinan:
I mean, I would want you to answer that question.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh God. Well, if I had the answer, I would've just said it. It would have been a comment, not a question.
Deborah Cullinan:
Go easy. I mean, for me, in terms of what we should be looking for, my brain goes to what's the system? Instead of what's the flashy thing, what are we striving for? So it's like looking for the conversations that are about equity in these emerging potential marketplaces. And I think your question about our relationship to our labor is one of the biggest questions of our time. What is our relationship to our own personal labor and why we work? And then what is our relationship to our workers? Lauren, we've talked about this. It's just really stuck to me that the way we've set it up, it ends up being that our financial structures in the arts are de-stabilizing to the community that we exist to support and to celebrate and to share the artists.
And so if you really break that down and if you had a magic wand and you could just be like, Okay, so let's just look at this. We've got lots of money. We've got lots of institutions, small, medium, large, we've got a ton of beautiful artists working all across the country. How would we reshift this shift so that it goes in the right direction? Eric Tang from Cal Shakes who is also exploring what it is like to create a floor for Cal Shakes artists, he articulated it really well. He's like, "If our artists, our core community, is only stable when we hire them or cast them, hire them to design, cast them or whatever. And then they're just unstable until we come back around. What's the point?" And so I think this idea of we're only as stable as our core community.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Tim is time for the suitcase question?
Tim Cynova:
I think it is time for the suitcase questions. We have five minutes then we're landing the plane, and have a little wrap up there, so go with it Lauren.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. So Deborah, I'm going to be a real asshole and read back how we got to the suitcase question last year. At the time you were reading Arundhati Roy's Pandemic is a Portal, and you said what she's talking about, at least the way I read it is that this is a portal we have to move through and that we have a choice. We can either move through it really heavily with our baggage. We can bring the racism, we can bring the avarice, we can bring the trauma, we can bring it all with us and we can trudge and fight and try so hard to not move through it. Or we can move through it lightly with very little. And if we do that, we can change everything. Which is beautiful. Tim and I somehow took that beautiful statement and we drilled it down in our ham-fisted way into the suitcase question. Which is, similar to what Kate had in the chat, personally, professionally, you've been traveling through your entire life with stuff. What's one thing that you had in your suitcase before the pandemic, that's never going back in, and what's a new thing that you're going to put in for the rest of your life?
Deborah Cullinan:
You even kind of prepared me for this and I find myself stumped, but let me give it a whirl. Yeah, I feel like I want to leave behind as much of this sort of top-down as we can so that we can all understand our ability to work together, to imagine something like we're in it. And I think what I would bring with me, I would still bring, as I said back then we leave behind our lack of imagination and we bring with us our collective ability to imagine something so powerful and equitable and good, why not? So leave the lack of imagination and the fear behind and bring the imagination forward. I think I'll end it there.
Tim Cynova:
It's terrific. And next year we'll ask you the same question.
Deborah Cullinan:
I'm going to be a little bit ready next year.
Tim Cynova:
Deborah, thank you so much for being with us for this closing session at the summit. It's always wonderful to spend time with you and really appreciate you sharing your time, your wisdom with us during the summit.
Deborah Cullinan:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I would spend all the time that I could in the world with the two of you.
Lauren Ruffin:
No same.
Tim Cynova:
Cool. Yes. All right, we'll see you next hour. Anyhow, thank you.
Deborah Cullinan:
Take care.
Tim Cynova:
Well, and with that, somehow we are at the end of the Ethical Reopening Summit. It feels like really that we just got started.
Lauren Ruffin:
That was a whirlwind.
Tim Cynova:
It was a whirlwind. Thank you so much to each of you who have been here with us for it. Thanks for incredible eight sessions, eight conversations to our speakers, our panelists, for the engaging chats and questions that have been populating through the platform. If you really miss us, we're excited to announce that we're launching two new online courses in the coming months. The first is a 10 module called Hire With Confidence. The second is a five module course that Laura and I are teaching called Shared Leadership and Action. You can find more about those courses on the Work Shouldn't Suck website. Lauren, it is amazing that this all came together and I sincerely thank you so much for helping make this a reality. And-
Lauren Ruffin:
Not really. You're the best person to do a group project with because you just run with it. I can't even keep up. Diane Ragsdale's still awake? What is it? 11 o'clock there? But no, this was just really dope. It was one of the most beautiful things about doing digital events is we get to be social while distance, we get to be intimate while we're far away. And it's really great to spend time talking about just a better way of living and a better way of being human together as we're all sort of, or most of us are really working to make the world a little bit more hospitable for folks. So this was dope Tim, and thanks for the idea and the opportunity.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. And with that, I guess we're going to close and have to end the broadcast.
Lauren Ruffin:
I guess we are. See you all later.
Tim Cynova:
And more thanks. Take care, everyone.
Find more about the Ethnical Re-Opening Summit, including speaker bios and session recaps at work shouldn’t suck dot c-o backslash ethical hyphen reopening hyphen summit hyphen 2021.
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